At age 9, Emma was wearing thong underwear. She was acting out. At 10, she began yelling and throwing things.

This wasn’t just normal preadolescent rebellion, Nora would later learn. The child, who should have been spending time riding her bicycle and braiding her dolls’ hair, had been sexually assaulted by an older boy at a suburban home. Nora had dropped her off there; it was to be a church group meeting supervised by adults.

By age 13, Emma was being sold for sex.

Nora, a relative who is raising Emma, never imagined it could happen in her family.

“Emma didn’t come from a bad home,” she said. “She was preyed on.”

Nora and Emma are pseudonyms for real St. Paul residents. The Pioneer Press is keeping them anonymous, and changing some details, to protect their privacy.

According to court records, Emma is one of 10 victims of the five people charged April 10 in Ramsey County with sex trafficking. The group of two brothers, two uncles and a woman who shared a child with one of the men were arrested after an investigation. An October email from Nora to County Attorney John Choi sparked the police probe.

Washington-Davis, Otis Washington and Calvin Washington remain in custody. All of the defendants’ cases are pending in court. They have not been convicted.

Emma’s early exploitation began when an older girl from her religious group befriended her, taking her under her wing. Her influence was powerful, Nora said.

“This girl had told (Emma) when she was 10, ‘Most kids have already had sex by the time they’re 10,’ and in (the older girl’s) world, maybe that’s true, because she was connected to pimps,” Nora said. “When an older girl tells a younger girl something like this, they believe them.”

Nora didn’t know it at the time, but the older girl became a recruiter, someone, usually another girl, who introduces a younger girl to a pimp. She befriended her and took her to parties under the guise of supervised religious activities. She worked to turn Emma against her family by playing on the rebellious feelings many adolescents have, Nora said.

As hard as Nora tried to keep Emma away from the criminals, they seemed to find her, she said. She was trafficked again and again.

“It’s very difficult once they’ve been groomed,” Nora said. “These traffickers and (recruiters) are real slick.”

Recruitment can happen any number of ways, said Laurel Edinburgh, a nurse practitioner at Midwest Children’s Resource Center (MCRC) and the founder of the Runaway Intervention Program there. MCRC is located at Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.

And the pimps don’t necessarily fit a stereotype, she said.

“I think we want to put the bad guys on the bad street corner. You really can’t,” Edinburgh said. “I’ve seen kids recruited on the Internet, through Facebook. I’ve seen kids recruited at the St. Paul Central Library downtown; I’ve seen Mall of America.

“They go with somebody who’s a friend and they meet another friend and that friend’s older brother is doing this to another girl. So it’s just a couple of degrees away from the really bad person,” Edinburgh said.

One male victim was trafficked by a pimp in Louisiana who wired money to Walmart for him, she said. The child’s parents noticed that he suddenly had cash and a cellphone whose origin he couldn’t explain.

Edinburgh suggested that parents use a tool called eBlaster, a type of software that tracks a child’s computer activity.

Sex traffickers often try a nice-guy approach, said Vednita Carter of Breaking Free, a St. Paul organization that offers services to girls and women who have been trafficked.

“The average pimp is not just going to come up to a girl and say, ‘I’m a pimp and I’m gonna sell your body.’ He knows that that’s not a good way to introduce himself and it’s not going to work. So he usually tries to befriend her first. … He buys her stuff. He caters to her.”

Then comes the moment when he tells her she owes him, Carter said. She has to pay him back. By then, the girl often cares for him. She may depend on him for basic needs, such as food and housing.

The average age that a girl in the United States begins to be trafficked is between 12 and 14, according to Breaking Free. Girls who appear vulnerable, such as runaways, are at high risk.

Nora got Emma into therapy when she was about 12, but damage already had been done. Emma began drinking and taking drugs. She lost the feeling of connection to her family, Nora said.

“Right now, I think she has problems deciding what side she’s on,” Nora said. Emma’s loyalties became strained, in part, because of the way she found herself treated by law enforcement. If she was picked up on the street or with a pimp, she was arrested, Nora said.

The incident that led to the arrest of the five defendants in the recent case began when Emma visited the house of another girl on July 6. The girl asked if she wanted to meet a couple of men to smoke.

“She didn’t know — she thought that they were going to hang out and chill with these guys,” Nora said. She was 15 at the time.

Otis Washington and Antonio Washington-Davis picked up the girls and drove them to a house in the 600 block of East Hawthorne Avenue in St. Paul, where the brothers’ uncles lived, according to the criminal complaints.

When they got there, Emma and her friend were taken to the basement. Her friend was told she was going to be forced to have sex with men for money. Otis Washington “tried to convince (Emma)” to do the same.

Other women also were in the basement; Emma heard them on their phones, talking about costs and locations with men who responded to ads offering sex, the complaints said. Later that night, Otis Washington took another girl to meet men who had called; he took Emma and her friend with them, the complaints alleged.

Emma was kept up all night and not allowed to leave the house, according to Nora. Otis Washington made advances toward her but she resisted, the complaints said. Fearful, she finally grabbed Otis Washington’s cellphone and dialed 911.

But when police came, things didn’t happen as Emma hoped. She told them that the man who answered the door was a pimp, Nora said.

“They didn’t believe her,” Nora said. “They talked to the pimp and they were friendly with the pimp and they treated her like she was crazy — of course, she was hysterical.”

Police eventually gave Emma a ride home but “never knocked at the door, or anything, and said, ‘Does she live here?’ ” Nora said. It was shortly after 6 a.m.

St. Paul police Sgt. Ray Gainey said he could not comment on the current case as it is still pending.

The St. Paul police and Ramsey County attorney’s office began a review last year of cases involving juvenile girls whom they believed were sex trafficked or solicited to do so. The goal was to identify where in their systems girls could be falling between the cracks and “improve the way we respond to trafficking situations,” Gainey said

The departments have made some changes as a result and have plans for more, they said. Ultimately, they plan to take the lessons they’ve learned to agencies around the state, to train them in best practices.

Choi, the county attorney, said it was Nora’s letter that prompted the investigation that resulted in the charges against the five.

“This is the first time in her life that this has ever happened,” that someone in law enforcement took her and Emma seriously, Nora said. “Because when this has happened to her before, she was the only one that got in trouble.”

Nora said she considers Choi a hero. He was willing to listen when others weren’t, she said. She also praised Linda Miller of Civil Society, who has provided counseling and legal help.

Both Carter and Edinburgh complimented police efforts to become better trained on the issue of trafficking. Nora hopes that continues.

She also urged parents and professionals to read “Renting Lacy: A Story of America’s Prostituted Children,” by Linda Smith.

“A lot of what was in this book actually happened to (Emma),” Nora said.

Emma still struggles, Nora said. She needs further therapy and help in order to assimilate back into a normal life.

But seeing the photos of the five people accused of sex trafficking on the front page of the newspaper felt like an affirmation to Emma. They were the bad guys, she told Nora — not her.

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